‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black: Worst song and video ever?

Music videos don’t have to be good to go viral on the Web — in fact, they can be so bad that you can’t help but stare slack-jawed at 3:48 of pure sh– um, shenanigans.

Case in point: The new video for “Friday” by Rebecca Black, which exploded over the weekend as people found what may be the ultimate combination of horrible lyrics, horrible songwriting, horrible auto-tuning (apparently to hide horrible singing), horrible cameos (c’mon, USHER!?!), horrible visual effects, horrible dancing and horrible horribleness. It’s so horrible, people are wondering whether the production is real or if it’s an elaborate joke.

According to reports — because I’d never heard of Rebecca Black or Ark Music Factory before this fateful day — the 13-year-old is the first singer to emerge from a new Hollywood-based online network and record label that is aiming to pump out tween pop. A noble and exciting cause, I’m sure, for aspiring young artists, but man … just check out the video below.

The video — released on Friday, of course — tallied more than 2 million views on YouTube over the weekend. Most of those, it seems, were people just interested in viewing an absolute train wreck.

Then again, views are views, whether they’re for good reasons or bad. Black has gone viral regardless. Which is great for a hopeful teenager with dreams of making it big in music. Good for her.

But the unforgiving online masses haven’t been as minimally sympathetic as my previous paragraph. As is expected these days, Black’s song and video inspired scores of parody videos. Some of the best are posted below. And Twitter — oh man, there’s some brutal stuff under the #RebeccaBlack hashtag, which was trending all weekend.